Interview: Kris P
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Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media no. 19, 2020, pp. 195–202 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.19.17 Interview: Kris P. Taylor Emily Caston Figure 1: Kris P. Taylor. Photo: Mike Taylor. © Kris P. Taylor, Emily Caston This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License 196 Kris P. (formerly Puszkiewicz) Taylor moved to New York from London in 1980. She was working at Island Records in the Publicity and Artist Development department when MTV was launched in 1981. The department quickly expanded to include music videos and she was soon promoted to Director of Music Video Promotion and Production. She left in 1985 to work as Executive Producer at Zbig Vision in New York after commissioning Zbigniew Rybczyński’s first music video, the MTV-award-winning Close to the Edit (1985) by Art of Noise. After successfully working together on fourteen videos over two years Kris moved briefly to work at MCA Records in Los Angeles and then in 1988 became Director of Music Video Production at Columbia Records (West Coast), working with artists such as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Michael Bolton, The Bangles, Alice In Chains, Billy Joel, Carlos Santana and Mariah Carey. In all she commissioned or was involved in the production of over three hundred music videos. This interview was held in London on 2 December 2016. I visited New York in 1979 and then moved there in about 1980. All the English bands were playing there: Adam and the Ants, Human League, OMD, Depeche Mode, The Police, Boy George and Culture Club, Eurythmics. It was just an unbelievable time. It was the second British invasion, The Beatles in the 1960s being the first. Newsweek featured a portrait of Annie Lennox and Boy George on its cover. Freddie Laker started flying very inexpensive flights to New York in the late 70s and for the first time people could fly to the US cheaply. New Yorkers embraced the Brits. I eventually got a job at Island Records in 1980 working in the publicity department and then the newly created video department. The roster included mainly British artists: Marianne Faithfull, Steve Winwood, Robert Palmer and of course Bob Marley and other reggae artists like Toots and the Maytals and Aswad as well as U2 and Grace Jones. Before that, I was working in a photo lab in London called Presentation Colour working with a lot of photographers including album sleeve designers such as Hipgnosis (All Pink Floyd covers, Peter Gabriel, 10cc) and the art departments of some record labels like CBS. They used our photographs to do layouts for album sleeves. A lot of my friends were going to New York and coming back with wonderful stories. I had ambitions to become a photographer’s agent and it was time to move on from Presentation Colour so I decided to take a few months off and travel to the US. I sublet my flat in West Hampstead and went to stay with a friend of a friend in New York who lived in the very cool East Village on 2nd Avenue and had a spare room. I was essentially a tourist but also had several contacts to meet up with in the music and photography world. I was offered a temporary job as a receptionist at a booking agency called FBI (Frontier Booking International) which was owned and run by Ian Copeland, brother of Stuart Copeland, drummer in The Police, and Miles Copeland, who ran the very cool IRS Records. The agency booked mainly British bands to tour (and therefore break) in America. I very quickly learnt a lot about the US and the music business and made a lot of friends. Bands used to come to New York then usually in a transit van or two to play gigs in clubs all around the country from Philadelphia to Nashville, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Austin, Denver. I remember, The Police came to New York in 1980 and played in a small club, I think it might have been The Ritz. Within three or four months they were playing arenas. The opportunity to grow and get exposed was amazing. College radio was very important then. College radio would play British bands and the college press would review gigs, records and interview bands when they passed through their town or do telephone interviews. I went to a lot of gigs at clubs like The Ritz and Irving Plaza. Through networking 197 I met Ellen Smith who was the head of publicity at Island Records. She offered me a job as her assistant. I put the photography thing to the side, although it remained a hobby and interest and started doing the college and local press. My job was to keep an updated mailing list, mail out albums and press releases and set up interviews for bands who were on the road, mainly bands like U2, Grace Jones, Robert Palmer and Marianne Faithful. Island was based at Madison Avenue and 49th Street in New York, in a beautiful art deco building. We were on the 32nd floor with spectacular views. I lived in the East Village on the Hells Angels block, East Third Street. I was paying very little rent; it was very funky but in a terrific location, walking distance to clubs and cafes on St Mark’s Place, the subway, buses and not far from Greenwich Village and Soho. I often used to see Quentin Crisp in the neighbourhood as he also lived on 3rd Street and we used to be able to get the Sunday New York Times on a Saturday night at midnight at the famous newsagent Gem Spa, on the corner of St Mark’s Place and 2nd Avenue, where I used to see celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg. The difference between New York and London was that it was such a twenty-four-hour city. The clubs were great. I sort of missed the boat on Studio 54, but there was The Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria, Irving Plaza and The Ritz, where loads of English bands played. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Madness, Echo and the Bunnymen. I remember making friends with Nicky Tompkins who worked for Pink Floyd (she later moved on to work at MTV). Stiff Records had offices on 57th Street. Island distributed Ze Records which was owned/run by Michael Zilkha, who came from the UK. Around 1983 Malcom McLaren came to the US to promote the “Buffalo Gals” album and his art director Nick Egan settled in New York for a while. Nick later became a very successful music video director doing album artwork and videos for INXS and Duran Duran in the 90s. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 80s and still lives there. In the first few months, I was working for Ellen Smith in Publicity and Artist Development learning how to do publicity on the job, setting up interviews with journalists as well as radio, attending gigs and making sure journalists were on the guest list or had tickets and were able to meet artists if possible. Then videos started coming to us from the Head Office in London. I already enjoyed going to video clubs especially the Ritz which was just on 11th Street and Third Avenue, a few blocks from where I lived in the East Village. They were always cutting edge. And really interesting. I was usually the first person to look at the video, and as there was no TV outlet yet, I would take them to the VJ at the Ritz on my way home and they would immediately play them on their huge screen. They were three-quarter inch, great big clunky things! It was during that period I realised that being involved in music video was where I wanted to be. Two significant videos that blew me away and confirmed my passion were Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean [1982], directed by British director Steve Barron and produced by Simon Fields of Limelight and David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes [1980], directed by David Mallet for MGMM. RockAmerica, Ed Steinberg’s video distribution company, was the pioneering company that made compilations of videos; they were given by record labels and distributed to clubs around the country. Ed was a director who had worked with Blondie and then directed Madonna’s first video Everybody [1983] but my main contact there was Lyn Healy; she loved British bands so was always very keen to receive the Island videos—U2, Grace Jones, 198 Blancmange—and we became very good friends. She later went on to work at N. Lee Lacey video production company and then ran Vivid Productions in Los Angeles (Luc Roeg’s company). RockAmerica also published a weekly magazine with a video chart and stories about what was in production and recent releases. Sound and Vision was owned and run by Tima Surmelioglu who was the VJ at the Peppermint Lounge and then at the phenomenal Palladium, which had two huge matrix screens hanging from the ceiling (twenty-five screens on each), and Liz Silver, who now owns and runs Believe Media with Luke Thornton. They formed a video production company called The End in the late 80s in New York then moved to Los Angeles and now produce mainly commercials. Sound and Vision also distributed compilations of mainly dance videos that they distributed to clubs and both Tima and Liz became very good friends. Tima also moved to Los Angeles in the early 90s and became a producer working at Propaganda Films and then on long-form concerts.